Derek Beaven - Newton’s Niece

I held my first real conversation. It was with my uncle, after mother went out to see about our journey. Neither of us knew how to begin. I decided it should be me. ‘I have no need to sing, Uncle,’ I said, looking up from the bowl in which I was dipping my bread.

‘What shall we call you?’ he replied. ‘Or more particularly, what shall I call you, since when you return home your conditions of life are to appear unchanged?’

‘Am I to see you again, then, Uncle?’

‘I think you must. I am much shaken, boy, I … I mean … I … You see I cannot name you. I am shaken all to pieces. Every certainty has evaporated, exploded rather. I saw … nothing. Well, indeed I saw a great marvel. I saw the heavens open and … I saw what I had been waiting for. I was jolted back to the edge of the roof despite my precautions. The very air broke apart. Charles held me. He saved my life I believe. The voice of it … Ah my guts chum over now when I think of it.’

He paused. ‘Listen. For my sins I am known about the world – O wretchedness of publication, a vile prostitution to the public gaze – as the man who captured God’s language, who understood His workings, His secret movements. My Principia explains everything … except the matter of the metals, the Chymistry, to which I also sensed myself close, so close. But now all that has … gone up in smoke, quite literally. I understand nothing. Nothing. Because of you.’

‘How because of me?’

‘It is a question of who we are. I … Yes, I am resolved. I see we are bound together. I will tell you things I have told to no man. And because of your changed condition you are still no man to hear it, I suppose. Well, it became clear to me as I grew into my Cambridge self that I had been specially chosen, specially marked out. It would be a fool who did not recognise this. You understand me?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘Do you not know what I have done?’

‘You have turned me into a woman.’

‘No, no, boy … woman. I mean what I have achieved. In the world of Art, Philosophy and Mathematics.’

‘No, Uncle. I can read, but I have only read my Daddy’s Church books, and what I could occasionally steal from Grandad Smith’s shelves, and from Ayskew’s library room.’

‘Like myself as a child.’

‘And the books in your laboratory, but only the pictures, not the language. I know nothing of the world of anything.’

‘Then I’m wasting my words. But I want to inform you – why, I don’t know. Why I should feel compelled to speak to you of myself and my Art, I do not know, I say. It is like an instruction; whose origin, as always, could be either from above or … below.’ He brought his fist down on the table, suddenly, and his face became anguished. ‘Shall I never be free of this ambiguity, this mockery of all I do? You were a monster, and are now a miracle. You’re an escape from reasonable law. To make you rational I should have to claim myself as the Christ, the only miracle-worker, which would be an abominable blasphemy in the light of what I see now. Damn you! You return us all to the abyss, the abyss of superstition. My project is thus in ruins and you are a walking fairy tale. Surely you see this. You cannot be so blank and recondite as you appear. What is it that you are? Amphisbaena. Ha! No. So I tell you once again that God, or someone else too horrible to mention, spoke to me in my ceaseless labours of the wretched Principia. I published, and he has proceeded to destroy me ever after. For what? For my Hubris? For my heart? You tell me, tell me what should I do. I can’t. Boy! Whatever you are! Female thing! Tell me!’ He became suddenly very agitated, but I was not frightened of him.

‘I don’t know what it is you wish me to say, Uncle.’

‘No. I shall teach you. I shall visit. It will be safe: I am unlike most men. You will be my Protégée. I shall tell you … what it is that has ruined me. And between us we shall survive this terrible event.’

‘On the window-ledge. That skull.’ The clay-coloured relic grinned at the room.

‘It’s a gift from … Mr Nicholas. It’s for you.’

We, my mother and I, left Cambridge on one of Mr Trueman’s carrier vehicles, which happened to be going West. She marked my face like a beard shadow with burnt cork, to mar my new beauty. Further to preserve appearances my mother tied my arms by their secret tapes, which was a zaniness, because the whole purpose of the secret tapes was to keep up the illusion that I was normal while travelling. I suppose it made her feel she had some control, particularly when Mr Trueman was there in the depot shed while the wagon was loading and they were saying their farewells. I saw them embracing and touching behind the angle in the wall where the counter ran, his hand thrust into the folds of her skirt.

Then we were bumping out of the city of my transformation at the slow pace of horses, moving off into the dung-smelling countryside. My mother sat up with the driver. Wearing a black hat I sat at the back with my legs dangling over the tailboard. My gift-skull hung from my neck in a net bag which bumped and rolled on my lap.

It was a bright day after the morning mist had cleared – one of Summer’s last throws. The St Neots road ran in lurching ruts while we curved between hedges, or struck across great reaches of stubbled fields, or plodded through villages. Other folk went about their sunlit business without sign of emotion, but the sight of ragged children playing and fighting round a pond triggered me to tears. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. And my tears ran and ran, not with the choking of sobs, but with a kind of permanent rinsing, so that I looked out over leaking elms, smudgy churches, and swimmers. I had the sense that at the back of my mind the other life was being catalogued; we might say now like an expanding video of lewd cartoons, played in another room, from which odd snatches and ungraspable flashes reached me. Or you might say they leaked through to me, because they made me cry even as I didn’t apprehend them. They were assembling and sorting themselves, I think. Their only bright clarity was in their summation: my resolve to destroy Monsieur Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, which had been a turning-point, if you recall the decision I made to out-think them all. And I knew that I was able to be still, and to wait.

So where, I ask now, had the wolf-boy’s cramps and twists gone to? Where were his snarls? Perhaps he was in hell. He had been displaced into another frame of being to await his time; but I think I also knew then that he could touch my thoughts, and that only by his aid should I make good my revenges.

‘Well. What with your uncle’s contribution and my endeavours we’re out of the wood for the time being, as far as money goes,’ said my mother. ‘Thanks be to God.’

While I finished growing up, he paid me visits. First, soon after the Incident, I had a letter of his to announce the programme:

‘Here,’ my mother’d said. ‘He sends an enclosed for you. You may count yourself pretty fortunate.

‘ Events which I do not specify on paper, child, have led to great alterations in my life. You have known me but a short while, and in that while you have seen me only as the thing I was; which the world now acknowledges was not a nothing indeed but a seer of new worlds and a maker of new contrivances. Nevertheless there are reasons why I must change my state. Where I saw so clearly and for so many years into the meanings of my researches, I find now my vision is muddied; perspectives have shifted, faculties altered. I’m sure he expresses himself very courtly,’ put in my mother, ‘but most of his writing sets me at a loss. You will, perhaps, not understand what I find myself compelled to write - indeed, and to the point at last,’ she said. Then she continued making out the intricate shapes on the page, ‘ to you here – suffice it to say, child, that I must go on in an entirely different way. Things are not what they were with me; I shall never find my former self again, I think. A parcel of books will arrive for you shortly by my direction. You are to read them. When I come I shall hope to find you perfect in them. I hope you keep up your duty to my sister your mother, and are of service to her in her bereavement. We are all in God’s hands, to whose mercy you may be assured you are commended by